Word: bruckner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...another seven months of unremittingly harsh and indifferent prosecutions of emulsified, vindictively pasteurized programs gleaming with lambent somnolence. Kirchner does not specialize in conducting twentieth century music, although he has performed Stravinsky stunningly, but responds with equal sensitivity to Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. His programs of Bruckner, Varese, Handel, Stravinsky, and Beethoven exemplified this catholicism...
...Anton Bruckner's Overture in G minor proved to be a beautiful small piece. Bruckner belongs to that unhappy group of composers including Liszt. Schmidt, Reger, Vaughan Williams, and even Schoenberg, whose music is fashionably vilified without benefit of humane audition. The tedious and lamentable caricature of Bruckner most often encountered is of an amateurish, even childishly naive, rural organist who afflicted the world with eleven appallingly identical symphonies which are massive, repetitious, incoherent and only convulsively appealing. If he is given any credit at all, which rarely happens since people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius...
...Bruckner was a romantic in the sense that he self-consciously implicated his faith and questionings in a musical tissue, but his romanticism is not the sturm and drang neurasthenic exacerbation of doubt and guilt which the term unfortunately suggests. Romanticism began as a vindication of the joy of a liberating mystical communion with nature rather than as a debilitating confusion of introspection with self-pity, or a lamentation on the evanescence of all things cherishable. It was, hopefully, a deeper recognition of mutability and then transcendence over corruptibility. The excellent program notes' suggestion that "Bruckner exalts the same romanticism...
...BRUCKNER found in his religious orthodoxy the same resonance of tradition and invitation to humanism, the same sustenance of spiritual and intellectual resolution, which he found in classical sonata form. His music proceeds with the deliberateness, comprehensiveness, mystical assurance, and formal clarity of the Mass. His symphonies are celebratory but never indulge in an easy rapture of tonal staleness or facile dramaturgy. Mahler learned much from Bruckner, primarily thematic linking of unprecedented subtlety among movements, the proliferation of material in the second thematic group, the immediate juxtaposition of radically differing elements (here Mahler extended Bruckner's simpler process of motto...
...personal nature of is musical thought, he composed as an act of prayer. He said, "All creation adorns itself continually for God." He was the sort of man who become despised because of his merciless ideals, but who relinquished all royalties on his works so that an edition of Bruckner could be published; a man who said just before his death that "poor Schoenberg will have no one left"; a man who spent all of his precious years perfecting his interoperations of Tristan, Fidelio, and The Magic Flute; a man who read Kant aloud to his wife during Children...